When your priors determine what the answer must be

Not much new information in this piece but a useful recapitulation of what has long been known.  From The Complex 50-Year Collapse of U.S. Public Transit by Tony Frangie Mawad.

Back in 1970, 77 million Americans commuted to work every day, and 9% of them took a bus or a train. By 2019, the number of U.S. workers had nearly doubled, to more than 150 million. But the vast majority of these new workers chose to drive: The number of public transit riders increased by only around 1 million during those years, and their share of the country’s overall commuters collapsed to 5%. 

That historic shift reflects several broad trends in U.S. life, including suburbanization patterns and urban highway expansion, the growth of the car-friendly Sunbelt, and the depopulation of once-robust industrial cities. But fundamentally, the fading usefulness of public transit is a result of the fundamental lack of integration between federal transportation and land-use authorities, says Yonah Freemark, a senior research associate with the Urban Institute.

“In a number of other countries, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are combined in one entity,” he says. “In the United States, we ended up with two different entities.” As a result, housing and mobility needs have been poorly aligned; the landscape is laden with housing that lacks access to public transportation, light rail lines that course through sparsely settled areas, and too many cities whose transit networks can’t connect riders with jobs.  

Missing from the entire article is that these outcomes may reflect 1) citizen choices, and 2) rising citizen prosperity so that they can make better trade-off decisions than before.

Also missing from the article is any history before 1970.  In the 1950s-1960s, most urban bus transport was provided by private companies.  There is no doubt that it was a competitive industry but it is also striking that public transportation ridership declines in the same period when the only choice was public transport.   

Also interesting Mawad buys into the idea that this is primarily a Federal institutional issue (Transportation and HUD) versus an issue of customer choices and preferences.  

Additionally striking is that Mawad does not discuss costs and, in particular, Federal, State, and Local subsidies which have a huge impact on ridership.  

This unequal pattern of transit commuting is even more acute when the share of commuters is taken into account. In New Orleans, for example, nearly a quarter of residents got to work via bus and streetcar in 1970. By 2019, only about 5% did. Similar drops are seen in smaller industrial cities like Buffalo, Richmond, Cleveland and Milwaukee. “In the 1970s, use of public transportation was really common in cities all across the country no matter their size,” says Freemark. Now, widespread transit commuting is a phenomenon limited largely to large coastal metropolitan areas. “Other regions don’t have realizable public transportation people can depend on.”

The lack of awareness of a market for ridership shows up again:

Cities where transit use has seen massive reductions tend to be those that have endured deindustrialization and suburbanization during the last 50 years, with a concurrent rise in investments in highways designed to shuttle car-driving commuters in and out of town. “These used to be places that had really successful downtowns, but now most of their workforce has suburbanized,” says Freemark.

The profoundly unequal geography of U.S. transit reflects — and contributes to — the economic gaps that have grown between cities; as struggling metros have shed jobs and wealth, their ability to maintain useful transit systems has likewise declined. “Most money that goes for transportation comes from state and local governments, and their ability to invest is based on their resources,” says Freemark. Poorer regions don’t have enough income to invest in transit, which in turn hampers economic growth even more. “It’s a negative spiral, a vicious cycle; there’s a trap situation going on.”  

Click to enlarge.

The closing paragraph is laden with unstated assumptions which drive the tone of his piece.

Not every region has the means to make the kind of transit investments that would be needed to bring riders back to their 1970 levels, and there’s no question that reversing the effects of a half-century of transit-unfriendly land-use decisions is a tall order. But it’s also increasingly urgent, given the role of car-centric planning in boosting greenhouse gas emissions. “The federal government could play an important job filling the gap” between wealthy and struggling cities, says Freemark. “But they haven’t done that yet.”

The questions unasked include

Why are people abandoning public transportation?

Why do they prefer car-centric transportation?

How do the different modes of transport compare to one another when all hidden subsidies are removed?

Mawad assumes that everyone agrees we need to control greenhouse emissions,  that use of public transportation in the 1970s represents some golden period of citizen need satisfaction, that the low use of public transportation is entirely due to land use decisions. 

Without answering the three questions above, Mawad will never unlock the supposed puzzle in his final paragraph.